Thursday, December 27, 2012

Invasion of the End of Year Lists

It's that time of year where millions of "Best Of..." lists scatter across the vast wasteland that is the internet.

For many of my friends, that means compiling lists of their favorite albums of the year. While music is like oxygen to me, I have never done this. For one thing, I don't keep up on current music. My other issue is that I'm not an "album" listener. I prefer my playlists to be made up of a variety of individual songs played in no special order at all. The age of on-demand streaming music is a good time to be alive if you're like me.

I also don't make any sort of BEST HORROR OF WHATEVER YEAR THIS IS list because frankly, I don't get to see most of the movies that come out during a given year. I wait for the sites I follow to make their lists, then I embark on a quest to find any that sound good to me. It's gotten a little easier to find new horror movies within my library system over the years, so some are ordered through interlibrary loan, others I find on Netflix and the rest are put on a shelf until they otherwise make themselves available to me.

Besides [REC]3: GENESIS and THE INNKEEPERS one of the few movies I did see (and brag about, at length) this year was CABIN IN THE WOODS. You have to understand that I'd been waiting for this movie ever since I first heard a whisper of it on the film news sites years ago. Not just waiting, but dying to see it. After all of that anticipation, not only did I finally get to see it-- I got to see an advanced screening in a big group of other film/horror nerds AND hear the director talk about the film afterwards AND the whole thing was amazing, even better than I dared to hope.

You had better believe that is a story I'm going to tell anybody who will listen for the rest of my life. That and my story about the conversation I had with Heather Langenkamp when I got her autograph at a horror convention. Hell, I will rise from the dead just to be able to keep telling both of those stories even after I've kicked the bucket.

I never wrote my own review of CABIN, and I'm not sure I ever will. I'm too in love with it to do a decent job, and there are plenty of others in the world who have already done so. In fact, the following summary taken from an Sam's Top Ten Films at Fangoria.com is probably the best description of it that I've read so far, and says everything I could think of saying:

If ever a film dropped the mic.

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS is exhilarating on every level. A sharp, brilliant look at horror storytelling and why we do it, Drew Goddard and Joss Whedon’s tale of five friends and their weekend in the woods adeptly manages major tonal shifts and heady genre examination. It takes its characters and their deaths seriously, while humor, genuine affection and boldness spreads until the incredible final moment. It elicits rewatch after rewatch, and hour after hour of conversation. Both subtle and outspoken, THE CABIN IN THE WOODS is no deconstruction. It’s reaffirmation.

Perfect. Some of the other films I intend to watch include THE WOMAN IN BLACK which I grabbed off of our shelves, KILL LIST, SINISTER, COMPLIANCE, PARANORMAN, and REVENANT when I get them in at the library. On Netflix, you can catch THE GREY, ABSENTIA, SILENT HOUSE, THE TALL MAN, LOVELY MOLLY, BEYOND THE BLACK RAINBOW and THE PACT. Phew. So much to keep up with.